NW tribes drive effort to save primitive fish

A photo taken July 8, 2011, shows a tribal fishermen searching for lamprey at the bottom of the Willamette Falls, in Oregon City, Ore. As long as Indians have lived in the Northwest, they have looked to lamprey for food. But in the decades since dozens of hydroelectric dams have harnessed the power of the Columbia, Willamette and Snake rivers to make electricity, this jawless fish popularly known as an eel has steadily declined until Columbia Basin tribes have just a few places left to go for lamprey, one where the majestic roar of Willamette Falls is framed by a power plant and an abandoned paper mill.

As long as American Indians have lived in the Pacific Northwest, they have looked to a jawless, eel-like fish for food.

OREGON CITY, Ore. — As long as American Indians have lived in the Pacific Northwest, they have looked to a jawless, eel-like fish for food.

Tribes once harvested the lamprey from rivers throughout the Columbia Basin, which stretches from the Oregon coast up into Canada. But with dozens of hydroelectric dams in the way, the fish has followed the path of the buffalo — from a food staple of a people to a curiosity.

Today, the tribes in the Northwest have just one place to go for them: a 40-foot waterfall on the Willamette River flanked by an abandoned paper mill and a power plant, and located about a dozen miles upstream from a Superfund site.

Unlike salmon, which have drawn billions of dollars in government funds to modify dams and restore habitat, the lamprey have gone largely ignored. It's the tribes that still eat them that are driving the effort to bring them back.

The greatest threat the fish now face is the dams, which "will probably lead to their demise," said Aaron Jackson, who heads the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation efforts to restore lamprey.

"That's really sad," he said, of a fish that has survived hundreds of millions of years while other animals, such as dinosaurs, didn't. "That something this old would just wink out in my lifetime — that's unfathomable to me."

The lamprey, whose English name comes from the Latin for "rock sucker," uses its mouth to glom onto rocks and other fish.

Several years after hatching, they swim downstream to the ocean, where they suck onto the sides of whales, sea lions and fish, feeding as parasites. At full maturity, they swim back upriver to spawn and die.

Three days a week in July, Indians drive hundreds of miles from their reservations, wade through the green water and, with hands covered in white cotton gloves, pull the writhing gray fish from rocks and stuff them into burlap sacks to take home.

There, tribal elders will grill the oily, pungent fish, or cut them into links and roast them like hotdogs over open fires.

The tribes of the Northwest have had a special connection with the lamprey for thousands of years.

The seven gill slits on the side of its head marked them as a food designated for the region's tribes by the creator, corresponding to the seven drummers and seven songs of longhouse ceremonies, Jackson said.

But as more dams were built, the lamprey declined.

Biologists have estimated that 1 million were still crossing Bonneville Dam on the Columbia east of Portland in the 1970s, before accurate counts were taken. That dropped to 200,000 by 2003, and stands at about 20,000 now, said Bob Heinith, hydroelectric program coordinator for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

A petition to list them as an endangered species was turned down for lack of information.

The full gamut of reasons for the declining numbers is not well-understood, but the dams are clearly a big one. About half the fish that pass one dam fail to get over the next, until only a dozen make it to the Idaho border, Heinith said.

Fish ladders and screens designed for salmon are tough on lamprey. Pollution is, too. Studies on eels in Europe link high levels of industrial toxins, such as dioxin from paper mills, mercury from coal power plants, and pesticides, with low levels of reproductive success.

Based on an agreement with the tribes, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is working on ways to get lamprey over the dams without making it tougher for salmon, which can be tricky, said David Clugston, a biologist for the corps.